Damien Laird

21Joined Mar 2023

Comments
2

I would say it a little differently. I would say that "judgmental" forecasting, the kind typically done on Metaculus or Good Judgement Open or similar platforms, CAN involve mathemtical models, but oftentimes people are just doing some simple math, if any at all. In cases where people do use models, sure it would make sense to link to them as sources, and I agree that would also be valuable to track for similar reasons. Guesstimate seems like the obvious place to do that.

I think that is separate from the proposition I intended to communicate for primarily text based research. 

I also wasn't anticipating any need to do scraping if this was implemented by the two platforms themselves. It should be easy enough for them to tell if a citation is linking to an EA forum post? Metaculus doesn't have a footnote/citation formatting tool today like the EA Forum's. (Although if you were to scrape, finding EA forum links within citations on this forum seems pretty well defined and achievable? idk, I don't write much code, thus me floating this out here for feedback)

Thanks for the thoughts!

Good points. 

This post comes to mind, which I cited in my nuclear GCR forecasts here, along with many other posts from that series. In general I expect posts from Rethink Priorities to be relevant. I've seen similar quality posts for AI risks and pandemics here. Most of my familiarity is with GCR's but I expected there to be strong overlap between popular forecasting topics and popular EA forum topics more generally. There are lots of GCR related questions on Metaculus, and you can find many cited in that link with my forecasts.

Still, I think you're right that this wouldn't be applicable to the majority of EA forum posts. Maybe it's only even displayed once a post is cited in a forecast, or only a particular tag is eligible for this in order to simplify the implementation. 

I do think making people's forecasting performance more obvious in different contexts would be very useful for the community (re: your brier scores in EAF profiles idea), and would love a central site that's sort of like a minimum viable linkedin that consolidates relevant metrics for an individual across the top forecasting platforms and has an API that makes it easy to connect to other accounts, or use with discord bots etc. I may write about this soon.

Generating forecasts associated with a post is interesting and I'm sure there are UX opportunities to make this easier / more common, but I need to think more about it.

Thanks for the thoughtful response!